At the beginning of class today, I relayed the story of one of my students from last semester and her quest for a job.  I hope she’ll be blogging about it soon on WebPubNET, but basically she was successful in securing employment for working a personal network. She made a point to come to a guest speaker engagement (consisting of one of my former students and her employer), asked questions during the session, introduced herself afterward, traded contact info.  Had a few followup conversations, received an invite to a lovely party, and then ultimately found herself getting called in for an interview.  She is now gainfully employed by Trademark Media as a Design Technologist! Participating in a community really works. And, this isn’t a random situation or one-shot deal.  I have been constantly impressed with the power of tapping my former students to place my current students.

We talked about the frenzy for the new iPhone and Apple’s processes to handle the demand come the release of the 3G version on Friday.

Google just announced its own entry in the virtual space with Lively.  It’s sort of a Second Life competitor, but right now, it is different in that it is not one cohesive “world.” Here’s the YouTube video we looked at for Bobcat Village, TX State’s Second Life island.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNP6IJwY90]

We looked at an article on Microsoft’s Vista, the much criticized operating system.  Apparently, Microsoft is going to take a harder line, not letting customers purchase new hardware with XP on it, the old, reliable OS.  This looks more like a PR move, in combating criticisms from competitiors (read “Apple”).  Good luck with that.  Anyone I know that has used Vista thinks it is a piece of junk, a big step backward.  Now that Bill Gates is gone, I think you will see more of this hard line approach to customer issues  via the management style of Steve Ballmer.

Finally, we discussed YouTube’s strategy for adding pre-roll and post-roll ads to some of their videos.  Most of my students felt that it was something that was bound to happen eventually, the free ride was going to be over sooner or later.  As we know, Google owns YouTube.  They are only going to be placing ads on a small percentage of videos that are preapproved by advertisers.  That does two things, insures advertisers that their products/services won’t be associated with potentially questionable material in some YouTube videos and it limits their liability for potentially generating revenue on copyrighted material.